The current trend in operating system development is toward the microkernel technologies. The MACH is one of the most important microkernels on top of which many operating systems are built. In this paper, experiences in porting the MACH-based OSF/1 operating system to the CONVEX C120 supercomputer are described. Several approaches are proposed for consideration of performance while others are made for simplifying porting efforts. Though almost of the porting efforts are machine dependent, experience can be easily applied to other projects for porting of operating systems to supercomputers and mainframe machines. The OSF/1 operating system is also evaluated using a set of benchmarks on the CONVEX C120 supercomputer to investigate the efficiency and integrity of the porting efforts.

Keywords: MACH, microkernel, supercomputer, VM, machine state, I/O

Received May 1, 1995; revised October 21, 1995.
Communicated by Y. S. Kuo.
* This project was partially supported by the National Science Council of the Republic of China under grant No. NSC79-0414-E009-449. It was also sponsored by the CONVEX Computer Corporation, Texas, USA.